Quickstart#

Welcome to the Salt quickstart! Use this guide to try Salt for the first time and experiment with some of its features.

Salt is a powerful automation framework and configuration management tool that can help you reduce costs by improving the efficiency and reliability of your IT operations.

Salt can automate and cut down on the time spent on common IT tasks, such as:

  • Installing and upgrading software
  • Configuring and maintaining devices
  • Deploying applications and services

You can use Salt with a wide range of platforms, including Linux, Windows, and MacOS.

Tip

To learn more about what Salt can do, see About Salt.

In this quickstart, you’ll get a taste of some of Salt’s functionality and learn how to work with Salt.

Who should do the quickstart tutorial?#

This tutorial is intended for IT professionals, such as systems administrators, site reliability engineers, and DevOps engineers. You don’t need to be an expert to use Salt, but you should understand some of the basics of working in this field.

Note

This tutorial uses a command-line interface (CLI) and you should have a certain level of comfort with working in bash, PowerShell, or similar CLI interfaces.

Before you start#

Salt uses a few unique terms. As you work through this tutorial, if you need a reference guide that explains some of these terms and concepts, see Salt system architecture.

Install Salt with the quickstart script#

In this step, you will install Salt and try a few commands to demonstrate how Salt can quickly retrieve helpful information about your system.

  1. For Linux and MacOS only: Install the prerequisites, using these commands. Select the tab for your operating system:

    sudo apt install curl xz-utils jq tar

    sudo tdnf install curl xz jq tar

    sudo dnf install curl xz jq tar

# If dnf is unavailable and the above fails:
sudo yum install curl xz jq tar

    sudo zypper install curl xz jq tar

    brew install curl xz jq

  2. Download and run the quickstart script:

    curl -o quick.sh -L https://raw.githubusercontent.com/saltstack/salt-bootstrap/develop/salt-quick-start.sh
bash ./quick.sh

    curl -o quick.sh -L https://raw.githubusercontent.com/saltstack/salt-bootstrap/develop/salt-quick-start.sh
bash ./quick.sh

    Set-ExecutionPolicy RemoteSigned -Scope Process -Force
[System.Net.ServicePointManager]::SecurityProtocol = [System.Net.SecurityProtocolType]'Tls12'
Invoke-WebRequest -Uri https://raw.githubusercontent.com/saltstack/salt-bootstrap/develop/salt-quick-start.ps1 -OutFile .quick.ps1
.quick.ps1

    Note

    Some commands can only run from an elevated prompted, meaning you will need to run them as an Administrator.

    This script downloads and extracts Salt. You’ll see output similar to the following (based on your operating system):

     *  INFO: Downloading Salt
 *  INFO: Extracting Salt
 *  INFO: Get started with Salt by running the following commands
 *  INFO: Add Salt to current path
 *  INFO:   export PATH=/home/${USER}/salt:$PATH
 *  INFO: Use the provided Saltfile
 *  INFO:   export SALT_SALTFILE=/home/${USER}/salt/Saltfile
 *  INFO: Create Salt states in /home/${USER}/salt/srv/salt

     Download Salt
 Extracting Salt
 Unzipping '.salt.zip' to '.'
 Using Expand-Archive to unzip
 Finished unzipping '.salt.zip' to '.'
 Adding C:Tempsalt to PATH

  3. For Linux and MacOS only: You need the last two lines from the output of the previous command. This output is specific to your operating system and you will use it for the this step.

    Using that output, copy the last two lines from the script output to update PATH and set the included SALT_SALTFILE for your system. For example:

    export PATH=/home/${USER}/salt:$PATH
export SALT_SALTFILE=/home/${USER}/salt/Saltfile

    These commands allow Salt to run from those directories.

  4. Now that Salt is installed, try running your first Salt command:

    salt-call grains.items

    This command may take a moment to run, depending on your processor speed. This command gets all the grain information for the machine you ran the command on, which is your local machine in this case.

    Tip

    Grains are the basic information about an operating system. It collects and displays a wide variety of information, such as your operating system, domain name, IP address, kernel, OS type, memory, and many other system properties. You can also create your own custom grain data so that you can target nodes based on your own criteria.

    The following is an example of some of the grain output:

     local:
 ----------
 cpu_model:
     11th Gen Intel Core i7-11850H @ 2.50GHz
 cpuarch:
     x86_64
 num_cpus:
     16
 num_gpus:
     2
 os:
     Ubuntu
 os_family:
     Debian
 osarch:
     amd64
 oscodename:
     jammy
 osfinger:
     Ubuntu-22.04
 osfullname:
     Ubuntu
 osmajorrelease:
     22
 osrelease:
     22.04
 osrelease_info:
     - 22
     - 4
 pythonversion:
     - 3
     - 10
     - 12
     - final
     - 0
 saltversion:
     3006.2
 saltversioninfo:
     - 3006
     - 2

  5. Try running a few more commands to get information about your system:

    Command Example output
    salt-call test.version 3006.1
    salt-call grains.get username root
    salt-call grains.get osrelease 5.0
    salt-call grains.get productname VMware7,1
    salt-call grains.get num_cpus 1
    salt-call grains.get num_gpus 0
    salt-call grains.get oscodename Photon

In this step you used Salt from the command line to get basic information about your system. As you can see, you can use Salt to monitor and quickly get system data. But that’s only a tiny fraction of what Salt can do. In the next tutorial step, you’ll see how Salt can connect nodes together to create a sophisticated job and communication system.

Install Salt on your infrastructure#

While it’s definitely interesting to see how Salt can quickly get detailed information from one node, the real power of Salt comes from connecting it to many nodes.

In the classic Salt infrastructure, a node running the salt-master agent can rapidly issue commands to many nodes at the same time as long as those nodes are running the salt-minion agent.

In this step, you will use the quickstart script again to install the Salt master and minion agents on your local machine. Then, you will experiment with a few commands to see how the master and minions interact.

  1. Run the quickstart script again with an additional flag that installs the master and minion agents:

    bash ./quick.sh -f

    This script downloads and extracts Salt. You’ll see output similar to the following:

       *  INFO: A salt directory already exists here, not extracting.
   *  INFO: Get started with Salt by running the following commands
   *  INFO: Add Salt to current path
   *  INFO:   export PATH=/home/${USER}/salt:$PATH
   *  INFO: Use the provided Saltfile
   *  INFO:   export SALT_SALTFILE=/home/${USER}/salt/Saltfile
   *  INFO: Create Salt states in /home/${USER}/salt/srv/salt
   *  INFO: Starting salt-master
   *  INFO: Starting salt-minion
   *  INFO: Run salt-key -L to see pending minion keys
   *  INFO: Run salt-key -a minion to accept the pending minion key

  2. With the salt-master agent and salt-minion agent installed and running, the master and minion need to authenticate with each other using Salt keys. Run the following command to list the Salt keys:

    salt-key -L

    Note

    Salt keys allow the minion and master to authenticate and communicate with each other. See Accept the minion keys for more information.

    After running this command, you’ll see output similar to the following:

     Accepted Keys:
 minion
 Denied Keys:
 Unaccepted Keys:
 Rejected Keys:

  3. Accept the minion key by running this command:

    salt-key -a minion

  4. When prompted, type y to accept the key and continue.

    The following keys are going to be accepted:
Unaccepted Keys:
minion
Proceed? [n/Y] y
Key for minion minion accepted.

  5. Now that the master and minion can communicate with each other, try running this command:

    salt minion test.version

    Tip

    This command is targeting the minion using its minion ID, which is minion in this case. You can target minions using other methods, such as targeting by grain data. For example, you could target all the minions with a particular operating system. See Targeting minions for more options.

    The minion returns information about which version of Salt it is running:

    minion:
    3006.1

  6. Try running a few more commands to get information about your system:

    Command Description
    salt \* test.ping Lists each connected minion and returns a True value if the minion is enabled
    salt \* disk.usage List the disks for each minion and information about their current disk capacity
    salt \* pkg.list_pkgs List the current packages installed on all minions along with the package version number
    salt \* pkg.version [package-name] List the versions of a certain package for all connected minions
    salt \* grains.get os_family List the OS family for all connected minions
    salt \* service.get_all List the installed services on all connected minions
    salt \* service.get_enabled List the installed and enabled services on all connected minions

Congratulations! You’ve tried Salt and had a taste for some of its potential!

Next steps#

Consider exploring Salt deeper by looking at some of these resources and features:

Resource Description
Salt user guide Read the instruction manual for the Salt Foundations course to get an introduction to key Salt concepts.
Install overview Learn how to install Salt for use in production in the Salt Install Guide.
All Salt modules Browse the list of modules to see the types of jobs Salt can do. Some popular ones are: file (remote execution module), file (state module), and pkg.
All Salt modules Browse the list of modules to see the types of jobs Salt can do.
Salt analytics This Salt extension allows users to run data processing pipelines alongside Salt.
Salt describe This Salt extension creates templates for Salt by fetching the settings of remote salt minions.